About The Mod Archive

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Purpose

An internet repository for permanent storage of quality music modules from the tracking and demo scene. The Mod Archive began collecting music modules back in 1996. Since then, it has grown and become one of the largest and oldest collections on-line, thanks to the artists that contributed to The Mod Archive and the Public Domain in general.

The Crew

The Mod Archive has had a huge number of helpers - we have always referred to them as the Crew. There have been so many, it's been hard to keep track of them all, but hopefully they are not missed in this article!

1996 - 1999 (Retired crew)

Details are vague around this time, although there are some tidbits of information left behind by the very first crew to open the site.

The main protagonists of the site, creating content and providing the artist accounts, screening the uploads and keeping the site running. Together, with Robert, they were the founding fathers of The Mod Archive.

Chris Tchou left this quote on his projects page: The Mod Archive - a collection of mods. This started as a joint project with several friends during my freshman and sophomore years at CMU. It was created because all of the existing MOD collections on the net had no screening process whatsoever, or were woefully small, making music browsing a painful experience.

Server side, Robert Watson was continually involved in the background, being the main sponsor for the server hardware and network, he maintained this role up until around 2006, occasionally dealing with hardware failures, operating system management and the setting up of new mirrors.

Damien Blonde

One year after inception, Damien Blonde took over the coding responsibilities of the site as the new technical lead. Again, details are scarce but if you happened to join the IRC channel and see a chap named "ModArchive", this was him.

Petter Borling (aka Ghidorah)

Petter joined us initially as a reviewer in 1999 and was soon making remarkable progress with the reviews, entitling him and a co-operative reviewer Reptiles to claim the Reviewer of the Month award. Towards the end of 1999 Petter took on more responsibilities; namely the management of the content as Damien Blond parted ways and left a gap to fill. Other stuff Ghidorah put time into was handling the infamous New dir (recent upload screening), managing and making the Top 10 lists as well as handling some of the artist administration.

Jan Tore Morken (aka Schabuda)

Jan Tore was also another involved in the upkeep of the site as well as being the main artist administrator, IRC channel operator, screening uploads and occasionally managing content on the site.

Michael Krefft (aka Gargoyle)

Michael took care of a lot of article write-ups - and maintained the Rippers list, and a fair few others handled the screening.

Chris G. Molyneux (aka christofori)

Chris was first added to the Crew as a reviewer in early 2002. Not long thereafter, he also joined the screeners (then called filterers) and was eventually added as an IRC channel operator as well, where he assisted in monitoring the channel during some 'off hours' when the majority of the Crew were sleeping. In 2004 when Chris obtained his degree from Uni, he took a full-time job and pretty much disappeared from online life entirely.

Sadly, the exact details of some of the assisting crew is vague as it was never documented very well and many of the staff became inactive/disappeared towards 2003. The remaining crew by 2004 just about kept the site ticking over, new content was scarce with the exception of the massive influxes of uploads.

2000 - 2004 (Retired crew)

Mikael Hedberg (aka Stary)

Mikael joined the technical team around Y2K, this saw some drastic changes in the site's design and functionality. Bringing in both dynamically generated pages and an ambitious search system coded in Perl. The server that the archive was hosted on was not very powerful so the efficiency of the coding was paramount - Mikael took care of this and produced the site which stayed as The Mod Archive all the way up until 2006. By 2004, Mikael had other personal commitments and eventually parted ways in late 2004.

2005 - 2007 (Retired crew)

Eric

Retired October 2007 due to inactivity. Eric dealt with the screening from time to time, and has helped out since around 2005.

Sampo (Ceekayed)

Retired sometime in 2007 due to inactivity. Sampo was also a part-time screening crew member, up until the end of 2007. Ceekayed is no longer active however he is still around on the forums as well as crewing the IRC channel.

2005-present

Red (m0d)

Initially joining the fold around 1997 as an artist, then reviewer, then crew member and eventually landing the administrative lead in 2004. Red took the site to new heights by recoding and implementing the Modarchive 2.0 followed by 3.0, 4.0, and is now responsible for all aspects of the site - participating both as a member and a crew person.

Scott

Scott deals with a fair part of the screening, and is also the backup admin when Red needs the admin responsibilities taken over from time to time (account management etc). He joined us in 2006 in the IRC channel and is now a valuable asset to the archive, an active forum member (at time of posting) as well as crewing the IRC channel.

Johannes (Saga Musix)

Johannes joined the crew initially as a upload screener in 2007, he now deals with a fair part of the screening process and was promoted to a full crew member around October 2008. He is now helping with various aspects of the day to day management of the archive, such as moderating the forums, coding, feature testing and dupe reporting as well as crewing the IRC channel.

Marcel (Alpha C)

Marcel joined the crew as an upload screener in 2009. He also helps with crewing the IRC channel.

Jan Tore

Jan Tore is still with us. These days he provides the Bit Torrent tracker for the huge snapshot downloads we provide, Jan Tore is still with us on the community side but no longer participates in crew duties involving the archive itself, except for making kick-ass Torrents and seeding them on super high speed boxes as well as hosting one of our file mirrors.

ASIKWUSpulse, Steffest, WouterVL

ASIKWUSpulse, Steffest and WouterVL joined the crew in 2018 as upload screeners to help process the daily influx of modules.

Development

Mod Archive 1.0 Development (1996-2002)

The Mod Archive originally surfaced in February 1996 and was created by Morgan Green, Patrick Nelson, Chris Tchou and Robert Watson as an elite repository of module uploads from various artists seeking a place to showcase their modules (see Crew history). Since then, the archive changed hands a number of times with each administration team keeping the site up and running as well as incorporating new designs and systems.

The Mod Archive saw several major design overhauls prior to 1999 by Damien Blonde (1997-2000) and yet again in 2002 when the previous administrator, Mikael Hedberg (2000-2004), built message boards, artist pages and an entirely new front and back end to the site. If you were around in those days you would have remembered this as the dark blue layout with the prominent A-Z across the top of the screen.

Mod Archive 2.0 Development (2005-2007)

The site you see now is a totally new incarnation by the new administration, (Red), meaning that it's been coded from the ground up and now utilizes a sophisticated database to manage the vast amounts of dynamic data.

Back in 2005, there were unfortunately no active site crew except for a very small skeleton crew consisting of Red and Jan Tore, meaning there was just too much for too few people to do. So, in November 2005, the signals that we needed to move to a new system were very clear - the old site was creaking under the strain of growth and so the development of the new Mod Archive 2.0 site began. The very early public beta of the new site became available around August 2006 - almost 1 year after beginning it. The new site finally came into production around January 2007, the 10th year anniversary of The Mod Archive. In April 2007, The Mod Archive relocated to a new dedicated and paid-for hosting arrangement due losing its main host at the time. Finding another "donated service" for the front-end was an extremely stressful and difficult thing considering how specialized the service needed to be for us. The very high demands of resources the site now required also pushed for the need to rent our own dedicated box, so thats what we did.

By May 2007, The average number of unique visitors to the site shot through the roof. This is when The Mod Archive began its donation drive to secure funds to perpetuate the server rental now that the demand on the server was on the rise.

Mod Archive 3.0 Development (2007-2008)

2007 saw the introduction of yet another redesigned version of The Mod Archive, a completely new look and this time employing a custom backend XML API which allows the design of the archive to change easily, and allow external applications access to its core features. Development of the archive is still ongoing with new features and refined capabilities being added and updated often. It is still a one man job, and its creator is still very much enthusiastic about the future of The Mod Archive - THE established module resource on teh intarwebs! [sic]

Mod Archive 4.0 (2009-)

Its still ongoing :-)

Nostalgia

Thanks to Archive.org I managed to get hold of most of the old news pages